The European Union should focus on regulating large social media platforms instead of imposing bans for minors to use them, Estonia’s Education Minister Kristina Kallas said on Friday.
European countries like France, Denmark and Greece are ploughing ahead with measures to keep teens away from using social media, citing mental health harms to minors. A POLITICO European Pulse survey of six major EU countries found that three in four people supported social media bans.
Estonia is the only EU country that openly opposes such social media bans for minors.
Banning kids from social media won’t “actually solve the problems” and “kids will find very quickly the ways to go around and to still use social media,” the Estonian minister said.
“The way to approach this, to me, is not to make kids responsible for that harm [stemming from social media platforms] and start self-regulating,” said Kallas, speaking at POLITICO’s European Pulse Forum in Barcelona. The “responsibility is on the governments and on the corporation side,” she said.
“Europe pretends to be weak when it comes to big American and international corporations,” but that’s a “pretense,” Kallas said. She called on the EU to “actually take this power and start regulating the big American corporations.”
Australia, the first country to implement a ban for kids having social media accounts below 15, has noted significant gaps in the way platforms implement the measures.
Sonja Rijnen contributed reporting.
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